A pychoanalytic study of Hitchcok's Spellbound

Résumé du document

Alfred Hitchcock has often been cited as a film-maker who used the Freudian and Lacanian theories of psychoanalysis and applied them to the narrative of his films. Spellbound is a film which uses psychoanalysis as a plot device; psychoanalytical elements are found both in the characters, like in many of his earlier movies, but also in the plot itself.
The story deals with psychoanalysis, which is a method by which modern science treats the emotional problems of the ordinary man. The analyst seeks only to induce the patient to talk about his hidden problems, to open the locked doors of his mind. Once the complexes that have been disturbing the patient are uncovered and interpreted, the illness and confusion disappear... and the evils of unreason are driven from the human soul. Here, the story focuses on the therapeutic release of one of the characters, John Ballantine. Psychoanalytical elements are explicitly described from the very beginning with an explanation to the audience of what it is and explicitly includes it as an important, if not the central part of the plot.

Extraits

[...] She is also distrustful of intuition, considered as a female characteristic, and appears as a rational scientist. The way the characters are filmed often gives priority to the male gaze; for example, when the couple goes for a walk, we see the scene from a male point of view: John is looking at Constance admiringly, we see her and not the wonderful landscape she is herself looking at; indeed, Hitchcock looks at Constance through the camera, John looks at her too and the female character is created by the gazes of the men who surround her in the film as well as by the men who view her on the screen. [...]

[...] This necessary shift in identification has been reproached to the film-maker, but we will see that it opens the story on interesting elements of analysis. Constance is the one who knows the theory, who is able to explain clearly what the Guilt Complex is : People often feel guilty over something they never did. It usually goes back to their childhood. The child often wishes something terrible would happen to someone, and if something does happen to that person, the child believes he has caused it. And he grows up with a guilt complex over a sin that was only a child's bad dream. [...]

[...] The scene of the flashback shows us a young boy pushing his brother who dies impaled on a spike. It serves to solve the protagonist's problem of amnesia; however, we can agree with Paula Marantz Cohen when she assert in her book Alfred Hitchcock, The Legacy of Victorianism: strangely truncated violent act, divorced from a context either of the boys' relationship to each other, or of the parental response, can only raise more questions than it answers.” (p.61) There seems to be no real link of this tragic event with the present and the fact that Ballantine contents himself with only this memory is rather unsatisfactory. [...]

[...] Psychoanalytic study of Hitchcok's Spellbound Hitchcock has often been cited as a film-maker who used the Freudian and Lacanian theories and applied them to the narrative of his films. Spellbound is a film which uses psychoanalysis as a plot device; psychoanalytical elements are indeed to be found both in the characters, like in many other movies, but also in the plot itself. Here, the story focuses on the therapeutic release of one of the characters, John Ballantine. Psychoanalysis appears from the very beginning with an explanation to the audience of what it is and explicitly includes it as an important, if not the central part of the plot: Our story deals with psychoanalysis, a method by which modern science treats the emotional problems of the sane. [...]

[...] We can try to give a psychoanalytical analysis of a film like Spellbound; however, how far can we go in such a work? Which are the problems of using psychoanalysis as a model for cinematic interpretation? In Spellbound, psychoanalysis is part of the plot itself, but its use is sometimes lacking depth. In his book The Hitchcock Romance, Love and Irony in Hitchcock's Films, Lesley Brill quite rightly asserts: [Hitchcock's] reduction of psychoanalysis theory and practice to its baldest ideas and patterns [ . [...]